I had the incredible opportunity to draw and design Low Roar’s newest album to date, Once in a long , long while… Here are some words I wrote about the process.

When I listened to the songs and closed my eyes, I was overwhelmed by the
sublime space of the sound. I could see a vast glacial landscape and Ryan’s voice
like a river runs through the land, his stories picked up by the current to be taken
to sea. I also saw currents of shadows, made up of memories. These are
memories of love and loss, which build up the bedrock to his islands of song.
My aim was to try and portray some sense of this. I wanted to welcome the
audience into Ryan’s thoughts. He looks out into the landscape away from us,
vulnerably, yet reaches bravely back with his hand as if to say, ‘Come with me’.
His silver streaks of hair shine out.
I loved drawing Ryan’s tattoos; each one a song in itself. He’s fascinated by the
number 13. You’ll notice this number in my drawing just below his left ear.

‘ ‘A Sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin, and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday.’ ’

Above – 2. ‘Yukiko and her Cat’

- graphite – 140 cm w x 60 cm h dated and signed 2015

Chapter 7, ‘SUBURB’, page 15 -

‘ Yukiko rolled over.

That plain, that simple.

Her body was small in its moving.

And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.

A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.

It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.’

Above- 3. ‘Rubbish Writes Itself ’ – £850

- graphite – 26 cm w x 34 cm h – dated and signed 2017

Chapter 8, ‘ORIGAMI’, page 17 -

‘He picked up the many torn pieces of paper about the sombrero and dropped them into an empty waste-paper basket which was totally bottomless, but the pieces of white paper miraculously found a bottom and lay upon it glowing faintly upward like a reverse origami cradled on the abyss.

‘Speak up,’ said the mayor. ‘Stop crying and tell me what the problem is. Why are you acting this way? I know it has something to do with picking up the sombrero but you have to tell me what it is. I am not a mind reader.’ When the mayor said that he was not a mind reader his voice suddenly grew loud and had an angry tone to it. This did not help the situation at all.

He was no longer shouting at the two men to stop crying or threatening them with the police.

He was shouting things that had no meaning like the license plate number of a car he had owned in 1947.

‘AZ 1492!’ he shouted.

‘AZ 1492! AZ 1492! AZ1492!’ he kept shouting over and over again.

His license plate number was inciting a crowd to riot…

Half a dozen fights were now in progress in the crowd which had grown to several hundred with dozens joining every minute. The newcomers responded to the mayor’s continued shouting of his license plate number by shoving other people and starting to shout things themselves.

‘I hate you!’ a seventy–one–year–old woman shouted at a total stranger, somebody she had never seen before in her life, and then she punched the person, who was an elderly man, right in the balls. He dropped like a stone to the street but was able to open the package he was carrying and take out a lemon cream pie that he had just purchased at the bakery and shove it into the old woman’s knee.

‘Pervert!’ she shouted down at him as he lay there grinding the pie into her knee.’

‘The American humourist sat on his couch suffering thoughts of her, trying to figure out how to win back her affections, wondering what had happened between them or just tumbling head over heels down into romantic oblivion where the image of a remembered kiss provokes bottomless despair and makes death seem like the right idea.

He experienced the basics of love ended.

Of course in his case these emotions were being played through a kaleidoscope of goofiness and insanity. But still he suffered genuinely and realistically as any other person. After all, he was still human. It was just that his mind translated this into a twelve – ring circus with most of the acts not worth watching a second time. After a while non – stop brilliance has the same effect as non-stop boredom.

It was now 10.45 in the evening.

The night would be long for him.

He had been suffering from insomnia, so that when he tried to sleep it was like having a brain full of barbed wire.

Phantoms and fantasies of love raced back and forth across his mind, galloping as if on horses frenzied by snakes with no place else to go.’

Above- 7. ‘Hair’

– graphite – 48 cm w x 84 cm h – dated and signed 2017

Chapter 52, ‘Hair’, page 129.

‘He went into the bathroom to get a glass of water and found a long black hair in the sink. When he saw the hair his heart sank like a rock. He carefully picked it up and looked at it. He looked at the hair very slowly. It was hard for him to believe that the hair was in his hand.

After he finished examining it, he took the hair back into the living room with him and he sat down on the couch and continued looking at the hair.

He turned it over very slowly in his hand and then he rubbed it together between his fingers. The hair had totally captured his concentration.’

Above – 8. ‘Drowning’

– graphite – 47 cm w x 35 cm h – dated and signed 2017

Chapter 54 , ‘Drowning’, page 137.

‘He was still sitting there on the couch staring at the strand of long black hair in his hand. His imagination remained immobile. Not even so much as a mouse ran across it. His whole life was now just Japanese hair. He had no other perception of the world and it was as if nothing else had ever happened to him except Japanese hair.

He turned the strand of hair over in his fingers and lost control of it and it fell away, disappearing on the floor. Panic- stricken he fell on his knees, looking desperately for it, but it did not allow itself to be found easily.

He was turning into a madman scrambling around on the floor, looking for a strand of Japanese hair.

He was on the edge of screaming as he looked for the hair. He thought that he would go mad if he didn’t find that strand of hair right now.

Then his whole life flashed in front of him like a drowning man, all for the loss of Japanese hair.’

Above- 9. ‘Logic’

- graphite- 47 cm l x 35 cm h – dated and signed 2017

Chapter 63, ‘Logic’, page 155.

‘Just when the American humorist’s mind was about to sink to the bottom of the ocean, logic like a life–jacket was thrown to him and he stopped drowning.

His mind was suddenly very clear and coherent.

He got up of the floor and went into the kitchen.

He opened the drawer and took out a flashlight.

Then he went into the room where he did his writing and got a magnifying glass.

Yes, logic now ruled his existence.

He very carefully got down on his knees again and held the magnifying glass to the floor and shined the flashlight through it.

He slowly analyzed the floor inch by inch.

He was like a child astronomer scanning the skies with a Sears and Roebuck telescope looking for a new comet that would be given his name because it accidentally crossed his telescope and nobody had ever seen it before or bothered to mention it, if they had seen it, thinking that somebody else had already discovered it. The only difference between him and the astronomer was that instead of looking for fame in the sky, he was looking for a Japanese hair on the floor but a moment later he had the same feeling of discovery when he saw the hair lying there.

I have been working on new drawings, paintings and collages. These paintings illustrate the novel, ‘Sombrero Fallout’ by Richard Brautigan, written in 1975. I am fascinated by this book and I wonder if you will be too? Fill your mind with it’s colours, characters and conversations.

My first painting of the series illustrates, ‘The sky was blue. The blue of human eyes waiting for something to happen’, Chapter 1, line 3, page 1. I love the way R. Brautigan jumps between worlds. I relate strongly to his choice of turning towards the fields of his imagination when life around becomes too much. This is why I spend my time reading and painting his story; so that I can leave behind the worries of life and feel less lonely by reading his words.

The watercolours explode across the page. I can swim in the colours.

Notice three small figures talking within the landscape. There stands The Mayor, The Mayor’s Cousin and A Man Out of Work.

Sombrero Fallout, Chapter ‘SOMBRERO’, Page 1 – 2.

”Is that a sombrero?’ the mayor said. Mayors always speak first, especially if it is impossible for them to rise to any other political position than mayor of a small town.

‘Yes,’ said his cousin, who wanted to be mayor himself. The man who had no job said nothing. He waited to see which way the wind was blowing. He didn’t want to rock the boat. Being out of work in America is no laughing matter.

‘It fell from the sky,’ said the mayor, looking up into the absolute clear blue sky.

‘Yes’ said his cousin.

The man who had no job said nothing because he wanted a job. He did not want to jeopardize whatever faint possibility he had of getting one. It was better for everybody if the big shots did all the talking.

The three men looked around for a reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky but they couldn’t find one, including the man who had no job.

The sombrero looked brand-new.

It was lying in the street with it’s crown pointed toward the sky.

Size:7 1/4

‘Why are hats falling from the sky?’ said the mayor.

‘I don’t know,’ said his cousin.

The man who was without a job wondered if the hat would fit his head.

Now both eyes were crying.

Oh God…

___CLICK ON IMAGES BELOW TO ENLARGE__

The drawing below is of Yukiko and her Cat. I love reading about Yukiko’s dreams of Kyoto, her cat and her long hair. I wish more than anything that the very well known American humorist would pick up the phone and call her, but like so many of us his worries and shyness get in the way.

Sombrero Fallout, Chapter ‘SUBURB’ page 15.

Yukiko rolled over.

That plain, that simple. Her body was small in its moving.

And her hair followed, dreaming as she moved.

A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.

It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.

The scene below depicts the development of the war scene. Once you read the book you will notice all the characters within the mayhem. Babies scream, limbs are flayed, clouds filled with tears loom overhead. Norman Mailer stands tall ready to document the destruction surrounded by tanks that I cut from 1970′s airfix magazines.

The central image of the Sombrero is a postcard that I found on eBay from the 1970′s of a sombrero restaurant, sent to me from California.

Sombrero Fallout, ‘DEAD’. Page 105

As the riot raged around the sombrero it remained safe in it’s little sanctuary in the middle of the crowd with it’s three companions: a crazy mayor still shouting his license plate number and two sobbing men who had been crying so long that they were like huge babies. They weren’t even aware that they were crying anymore. They didn’t even know where they were at or what they were doing.

Tears just flowed up through underground springs directly into the bottoms of their feet and went up through to their bodies and came out their eyes…or so it seemed. Nothing else could explain where they were getting all those tears to cry with.

Those tears had come from someplace, so it might as well be from hidden crying springs that came from deep in the earth and flowed great distances, originating at cemeteries and from cheap hotel rooms decorated in loneliness and despair.

Sombrero Fallout, ‘MAILER’, page 151. line 19.

Norman Mailer’s arrival was sixteen hours away. He would look tired when he got off the airplane at a nearby town. It had been a long hard flight.

‘What’s going on here?’ would be his first words when he touched ground.

There would be a couple of reporters waiting to interview him. They were nervous because they were young and liked Mailer a great deal. Then Mailer would look at them suspiciously. He wondered why they were interviewing him instead of being at the town writing about what was going on there.

‘Are you Norman Mailer?’ one of the reporters said nervously, even though he knew that it was Norman Mailer. He stood there with a pad and pencil in his hands waiting for Norman Mailer to say that he was Norman Mailer, so that he could write it down.

‘Got to get to work,’ Mailer said and walked over to a waiting car that was to take him to the town.

‘Was that Norman Mailer?’ the young reporter would say to his colleague. Even his colleague was put off by that and looked around in embarrassment.

‘That was Norman Mailer,’ the young reporter would say to himself now because Norman Mailer was gone and his colleague looked away.

‘Norman Mailer,’ the young reporter wrote down on his pad.

That’s all he wrote.

Norman Mailer.

At the moment, I am working on a drawing of the Mayor, The Mayor’s cousin and The Man Out of Work with his berry stained hands. Oh how hungry he is!

Here below are my beginnings, for the moment kept secretly in their black box.

I will continue to explore the book with an aim of creating a series of eight paintings and a small edition of hand bound books including prints of the paintings within.

Yours truly,

Lilias B

P.S A KALEIDOSCOPE SKETCH

KALEIDOSCOPE , Sombrero Fallout, pg.103 R. Brautigan

The American humorist sat on his couch suffering thoughts of her, trying to figure out how to win back her affections, wondering what had happened between them or just tumbling head-over -heels down into romantic oblivion where the image of a remembered kiss provokes bottomless despair and makes death seem like the right idea.

He experienced the basics of love ended. Of course in his case these emotions were being played through a kaleidoscope of goofiness and insanity. But still he suffered genuinely and realistically as any other person. After all, he was still human. It was just that his mind translated this into a twelve-ring circus with most of the acts not worth watching a second time. After a while non-stop brilliance has the same effect as non- stop boredom.

It was now 10.45 in the evening.

The night would be long for him.

He has been suffering from insomnia, so that when he tried to sleep it was like having a brain full of barbed wire.

Phantoms and fantasies of love raced back and forth across his mind, galloping as if on horses frenzied by snakes with no place else to go.